But that hasn't stopped nearby residents from sounding the alarm. Andrew Krieger, an artist who has lived in the neighborhood for 23 years, says he's got 225 petitions from immediate neighbors against the hours and size of the new establishment. In an attack worthy of the "New York Investor" flyer down on 14th Street, Krieger sent City Paper an email entitled "Big Box Coffee House Coming to Columbia Heights!!!" It reads, in pertinent part:

The 11th Street corridor is currently a low-density mix of commercial and residential properties. A business like Margot’s Chair, with no dedicated parking, would alter the dynamic of the surrounding community. At present, our community already feels the impact of other businesses that draw medium-size crowds, and that stay open late. To bring in another one that is even larger does more than demonstrate a lack of planning; it’s irresponsible.

Residents in Columbia Heights want development, but we want it to be responsible development. We want it to be designed so that all can enjoy the peace and tranquility of their homes. If Margot's Chair comes to Columbia Heights, we welcome it to the neighborhood. But be a good, respectful neighbor, and keep the hours of other existing businesses, and partner with the community. Many already have issues with noise, trash and parking. An establishment of this size—occupying a space that used to house six businesses—will negatively impact residents and local houses of worship. It will set a dangerous precedent for all future business in our community.

An issue of this magnitude needs to be carefully reviewed, weighing the benefit to the city’s coffers against the potential destruction of community. There are alternatives in this eccentric, low-density strip, alternatives that maintain community and foster a strong city. These should be studied closely.

A "group of five" is working on challenging Stavropoulos' liquor license. The Alcoholic Beverage Control board may well throw out the protest. But if those 225 signatures are for real, it appears that a significant chunk of nearby residents have a problem with how Stavropoulos' business plan, which will be the first of its kind on the city's newest hip strip and help make the neighborhood into a vibrant, around-the-clock kind of place. And that raises a question: Do neighbors have a right to dead quiet, abundant parking, and empty sidewalks? If you've lived someplace for a long time, should you have a say in the kinds of businesses that decide to come there and change how it feels?

You could try to answer that question by arguing in favor of what Margot's Chair will create. The strangest part of Krieger's letter is the notion that such an establishment would result in the "destruction" of the community, when these kinds of gathering places are exactly what builds community. Having employees and customers up and around during all hours make a neighborhood still troubled by violence much safer. And surely it's better to have a place that caters to a wide variety of people and uses, rather than just another bar. Et cetera.

But the more fundamental point here is that when you move to an area, you sign up for what it's zoned to accommodate and what the market might attract. Eleventh Street is starting to take on attributes of being a real city. Cities don't have entertainment ghettoes and residential suburbs, they have places to eat, drink, caffeinate, and hang out interspersed with areas where you live, play, and work. When it's hard to park, people adapt, which is healthier for everyone. A lot of people really like that kind of environment. Why should the preferences of the people who've been in an area for a long time trump those of people who are moving in, or those who might come from elsewhere to enjoy them?

Cardozo High School in Columbia Heights is due for a renovation, and designers aren't thinking in half-measures: Initial architectural plans propose building two new gyms (a "natatorium" and a basketball court) on what are now grassy terraces flanking the historic building.

Eric Fidler reports that the large new gyms are necessary because the school was built with two separate, smaller facilities for girls and boys. The basketball gym would be nestled into the west hillside so as to avoid obstructing views from Clifton Street, with a parking lot on top. The swimming pool is harder to get a sense of, massing-wise, but would expand the school's footprint nearly to 11th Street.

It's hard to believe that the budget will be found for both of them, but it's possible. To learn more, go to the ANC 1B meeting on Thursday at the Reeves Center.

View looking east from over 13th Street.

Randolph Towers' new look.

Back in July, I wrote about a large building on Randolph and 14th Street NW that had tried to go through a tenant purchase before the real estate crash, got in way over its head with renovations, and ended up desperately trying to get renters to qualify for the city assistance and loans they needed to buy their apartments.

Things have not improved. In fact, they've worsened considerably.

On March 30th, all but 17 of Randolph Towers' 146 units are scheduled to be sold at auction, with $17.783 million (plus interest, advances, late charges, and expenses) owed on the note to EagleBank. If the bank goes through with the sale, all of the more than 70 remaining tenants could be evicted, and their units sold at market rate.

How did Randolph Towers get into this position? There were communication issues among the tenants and their housing counselors, as I originally described. But the other problem was the even after a glitzy marketing effort, EagleBank refused to let market-rate buyers close on their contracts, saying the sale prices weren't high enough to result in a full repayment of the loan.

The lawyers are looking for another lender to forestall the sale, but things aren't looking good. So if you want to live in a newly-remodeled condo, you may soon be able to buy one at a price as high as the market will bear, with its low-income former tenant expelled.

Those trailers are gone. (Darrow Montgomery)

If you've noticed more men sleeping on the streets lately in Columbia Heights–despite the bitter cold–it's probably because the place they'd have stayed for the last couple of decades, La Casa shelter on Irving Street, has been closed for over two months now. With the help of public interest lawyer Jane Zara, a few of them have signed on as plaintiffs in a case against Mayor Adrian Fenty, alleging violations of both D.C. and federal law. Charges include:

• The closure of a shelter in the face of acute need for services is "in conflict with the goals envisioned by the drafters" of the Homeless Services Reform Act, passed in 2005. As part of that effort, permanent supportive housing–to which all La Casa residents were supposed to be transferred–"was never intended to be used as an excuse for displacing the homeless from the low barrier shelters before the needs of the inhabitants have been met."
• Forcing the mentally disabled homeless to seek services far away from their accustomed place of residence is a violation of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
• Pushing La Casa's homeless residents into further-flung regions of the district violates the Fair Housing Act, since it has a disparate impact on poor, minority, and disabled people.
• Taking away a low-barrier shelter in the face of increasing need, with inadequate short-term alternatives and indeterminate long term plans for its restoration, flies in the face of the City Council's resolution to declare D.C. a Human Rights City.

This is the same group that sued the city over its closure of the Franklin Shelter, which hasn't yet resulted in its reopening–a decision is still pending in the D.C. Court of Appeals–but I supposed each shelter closed bolsters the case that the next one might be illegal.

Read the plaintiffs' most recent filing here. A hearing is scheduled for next Monday, December 20th, at 3:00 p.m. in Courtroom 29A of the US District Courthouse.

The small square in Hyattsville (from above here) looks eerily similar to the Columbia Heights streetscape's concentric circles:

(Lydia DePillis)

(DDOT)

Designs for the new Silver Spring library are reminiscent of D.C.'s Shaw Library, with their triangular glass protrusions.

(Lukmire Partnership)

(Davis Bond Brody Aedas)

Tuesday morning marked a starchy celebration on Irving Street NW in Columbia Heights: The grand opening of IHOP’s 1,500th location, complete with a dancing pancake, free short stacks of pancakes, and a Washington Monument shaped out of...you get the picture. Inside, IHOP execs visiting from California for the occasion congregated in the back room, while D.C. politicians wore royal blue IHOP cardigans and were presented with commemorative spatulas before digging into their complimentary breakfast.

It’s only fitting that IHOP should be fêting the locals. The owners are, after all, benefiting from $46.9 million in tax increment financing the city earmarked to build the DCUSA shopping complex in 2006. Developer Grid Properties agreed to set aside 15,000 square feet for small, local, minority-owned businesses, which would get an approximately 30 percent discount on rent in those spaces.

Finding those tenants was left up to the non-profit Development Corporation of Columbia Heights. Four years later, exactly two businesses have taken the deal: IHOP, and Señor Chicken, the third location of a Peruvian rotisserie place. It’s not for lack of interest; DCCH’s president and CEO Robert Moore says around 65 small businesses asked about the spaces. Usually because of financing issues, none of them worked out—the closest was another locally owned franchise of Quizno’s. (Meanwhile, some small businesses DCCH helped place in the nearby Tivoli building didn’t make it).

IHOP, on the other hand, kept cruising. Jackson Investment Company, a small residential real estate outfit that had signed a three-store deal with IHOP, first heard about the location in 2007. The partnership of a father and two brothers was an attractive candidate for a number of reasons—African American, Ward 8-based, retired police and military. But what DCCH liked most was the attribute small business incentives are typically set up to avoid: They were part of an international brand that helped the store get off the ground and will make it harder to fail.

“All the new businesses that you see are franchises,” says Moore. “That’s a stronger way, and it’s a safer way for people to invest.”

—

One morning last week, franchise owner Tyoka Jackson ambles out onto the restaurant floor in a track suit—a habit left over from 12 years in the National Football League—and lowers his considerable bulk onto a cushioned bench. He’d spent most of his time at the Columbia Heights location over the last few weeks, overseeing build-out and training, and was anxious to know how the new store is perceived.

“What’s the buzz?” he asks. “People are saying it’s gonna bring an ‘element.’” Jackson reads the local blogs, which have been pretty much split down the middle on the prospect of a downmarket diner on Irving Street. “When did IHOP become a hot spot for gang members and criminals?” he wonders.

That’s the thing about being a franchise, for better and for worse: People bring their own impressions to it, and for many, it’s just another chain in a complex already bursting with brands. In some ways, the Jacksons’ IHOP enterprise is a small business. They’ve put in the $1 million for construction, made hiring decisions, and will be the ones to lose their shirts if the place fails.

But the Jacksons have a few advantages an independent business could never claim. They get expert business consulting courtesy of the mothership, pooled television advertising, and supplies from a nationwide sourcing cooperative shared with corporate sister Applebees. Recipe development and product design are outsourced to IHOP’s labs in Glendale, Calif.

The last advantage lies in not being an independent business: IHOP is a known quantity.

“Having a sign that says Jackson’s Pancakes is different from putting a sign up that says IHOP,” Jackson explains. “That is a level of comfort for some people.”

Even with all that assistance, Jackson says he couldn’t have afforded market rate rents in DCUSA. Which raises the question: When a sure-fire franchise can qualify for a mandated “small business” set-aside, why would a developer ever go for an actual independent entrepreneur? Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham says he’s been trying to lure IHOP since 2002, when he proposed a location at 10th and U streets NW. He doesn’t see a substantive difference between a franchise like the Jacksons’ and something homegrown, and has been entirely sanguine about other chains opening on his turf.

The local business community, predictably, looks at things a little differently. At an October launch party for the new website of non-profit advocacy group Think Local First D.C., Graham put himself in for an awkward moment when—right after D.C. Council Chairman-elect Kwame Brown sang the praises of independents—he talked about how great it was that IHOP would be opening in DCUSA the next month.

That didn’t impress Constantine Stavropoulos, owner of popular hangout spots Open City, Tryst, and the Diner. The successful restaurateur says he never heard of any outreach to established entrepreneurs from DCCH about the DCUSA spot—even though developers are banging down his door to put his next location in their ground-level retail space.

Neither, for that matter, did the Tivoli North Business Association, which represents small businesses north of Park Road. Nor did the Mount Pleasant Business Association. If DCCH was trying to find an excellent non-franchise tenant for that space, it was keeping a pretty good secret.

—

One of the groups happiest about IHOP’s new location in Columbia Heights? IHOP itself. If the performance of DCUSA’s other anchor tenants is any indication, the Columbia Heights IHOP should also be a high performer, which feeds back into the corporate coffers. On top of a $40,000 franchise fee, 4.5 percent of Jackson’s net sales goes straight to Glendale (he pays another 3 percent for regional advertising).

On Monday, CEO Jean Birch sits drinking coffee at a corner booth with Patrick Lenow, communications director for IHOP’s parent company, DineEquity Inc. Corporate executives don’t always attend store openings, but the 1,500th was a special occasion.

“This is a big milestone,” Birch says. “We are the 20th largest restaurant chain in the country. It’s a big deal to us.”

Though it’s up to the franchisee to find financing for each new store, IHOP headquarters helps along the way, and signs off on each location. Birch says getting a set-aside rent discount was “fairly unique” for her franchises. It’s fairly unique for the District, too—none of the relevant government agencies could think of another instance where a franchise had received a small business incentive. Typically, franchises don’t qualify as Certified Business Enterprises, the designation that gets them preferential treatment on many government contracts and incentive programs.

To listen to everyone involved in the IHOP deal, taking a chance on an independent operator would be an insane risk for a developer. To prove it, Lenow pages through the laminated menu, pointing out some of their regional specials, the relatively low-calorie Simple & Fit menu, and the mixed beef-and-bacon burgers.

“Would an individual entrepreneur bring that same creativity?” Lenow asks, rhetorically. “Trial-and-error is very expensive.”

Got a real-estate tip? Send suggestions to ldepillis@washingtoncitypaper.com. Or call (202) 650-6928.

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

(Darrow Montgomery)

Irving Street NW in Columbia Heights has gone through some growing pains in the last decade. Buildings have mushroomed on vacant lots, but haven’t yet filled out—glassy storefronts are still covered with brown paper, even as young people with disposable income pour into the residential towers clustered around the Metrorail station.

One thing hasn’t changed at all: La Casa shelter for men, a bunker-like building just west of the new Highland Park apartment complex. Tall white trailers loom in a concrete yard behind a chain link fence. Every morning at 7 a.m., about 70 men trickle out of the gates, mostly dispersing before the young professionals start scurrying along the narrow sidewalk on their way to work. Their neighbors glance incuriously through the fence, but don’t break their pace. “Sometimes, in the middle of the night, you hear people screaming,” says Kerry Porter, a young woman on her way out of Highland Park last Sunday morning. She says she didn’t know about the shelter before moving into a corner apartment overlooking it, and might have been more hesitant if she had.

“It’s really squalid back there,” adds another apartment dweller, who declined to give his name. “If you look from the rooftop, you’ll see rats, little kids and rats all together...I think the way it’s set up now is a disservice to the homeless. It looks like a concentration camp.”

Each of the five trailers holds 15 people in narrow bunks stacked three levels high, cushioned with thin, plastic-covered mattresses. The main building with fading murals on the side is an open hall, one wall lined with bunks, which are used to handle overflow during winter. Men start lining up at 3:30 p.m. and are let in at 4 o’clock, after which they’re served dinner and then shut in the trailers at 7 o’clock for the night.

But the trailers have been less crowded lately. In the shelter window, a sign warns residents that La Casa will be closing on Oct. 15, and the Department of Human Services will place them in individual apartments rented by private landlords. One by one, the men are disappearing to scattered sites around the city, as part of the District’s strategy to place the homeless in stable housing, under the theory that having your own place to live is the best foundation for recovery from alcoholism and substance abuse.

In La Casa’s case, though, something more than just strategy is at work: Donatelli Development, which received the land where the shelter sits back in 2002, is finally ready to build the second phase of Highland Park, and the trailers have to be gone on Nov. 1.

This wasn’t supposed to be yet another story of gentrification leaving homeless people stranded. According to the plans, Donatelli will leave space on Irving Street for DHS to build a new 70-unit community-based residential facility (CBRF, in development jargon) on the lot where trailers now sit.

But plans are one thing; reality is another. The needed $10 million in city funding still hasn’t been locked down. And you don’t have to be a cynic to wonder whether the District will actually muster the political and financial will needed to build housing for the homeless next to a fancy, brand new apartment complex. There’s almost no way the city would place a new homeless shelter in the middle of fast-developing Columbia Heights if it wasn’t already there; only a couple years ago, neighborhood opposition torpedoed the Central Union Mission’s plans to put a 170-bed shelter in Park View, just south of another new Donatelli project at the Georgia Avenue-Petwoth Metrorail station, in another rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

No one wants to say so publicly, but a lot of the players involved in Columbia Heights seem to assume La Casa may run into similar problems. In a Zoning Commission hearing last week to review Donatelli’s proposal to add more density to its apartment building, chairman Anthony Hood called the new CBRF a “model amenity” that should be incorporated into more projects—but nobody knew where DHS was in the planning process for replacing La Casa. Commissioner Michael Turnbull noticed that the designs had windows on a wall that, assuming the CBRF is constructed, will look out onto the shelter.

“Is it an indication on how quickly D.C.’s going to be building the CBRF that you’ve got windows on the front?” Turnbull asked Chris Donatelli.

“That was a request that we agree with the Office of Planning that in case…”

“Something went wrong, or didn’t happen?” Turnbull interrupted.

“Or took longer than anticipated,” Donatelli finished. The hearing moved quickly on.

—

If La Casa has become a hurdle for developers and city officials to work around now, back in 1983, it was created to solve a problem. Nancy Shia, a former journalist and photographer who has lived in Adams Morgan for nearly four decades, recalls that the Mariel boatlift from Cuba had brought a population of poor, often-alcoholic Cuban men to the District. To keep them off the streets, she advocated for the creation of a bilingual shelter.

The shelter moved to its current location on Irving Street when the corner lot was empty and hosted weekly farmers’ markets. When Donatelli Development won the land in 2002, there was no mention of replacing La Casa. That changed when local non-profit Neighbors Consejo helped organize residents to advocate to keep the shelter there. The Columbia Heights Metrorail station had opened in 1999, but the influx of new development, was still years off.

“At that point, nothing was built, there were no neighbors to rise up in arms about any homeless people next to them,” says Elizabeth McIntire, who was the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for the area at the time.

When Highland Park opened in 2008, it couldn’t command the high rents that had been anticipated, prompting Donatelli to request an $8.5 million tax abatement from the city. The Office of the Chief Financial Officer’s fiscal impact statement said the District couldn’t really afford the abatement, but the council passed it anyway. Meanwhile, the money that had been set aside to rebuild La Casa disappeared: In 2007, the Fenty administration dissolved the NCRC and folded its assets into the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, and La Casa’s budget got lost in the shuffle. (Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham, who had pushed for the shelter, now says “I don’t know” what happened to the money for La Casa.) The Department of Human Services now says it has $4 million for the project, and the remaining $6 million is in the District’s budget request from the federal government, which should pass this winter. But that’s not a sure bet.

“Election years, all kinds of crazy things happen,” says Laura Zeilinger, who oversees homeless services for DHS.*

And all along, the shelter—which could have been rebuilt when the first phase of Highland Park went up—just kept getting worse. Why spend money to improve something if it’s supposed to be entirely replaced?

—

Even if La Casa is rebuilt, it won’t be a shelter, as neighborhood advocates had initially expected. It’s the gentrified version of housing for the homeless—every man gets a room of his own (and the trailers will be replaced with a building that stands out less in the surrounding area). In the meantime, the city maintains that placing the residents in their own apartments alleviates the need for emergency shelter. “We don’t feel like that we’re taking something away,” says Zeilinger. “We think that we’re really adding a lot of value… It’s the right thing to do to replace 25-year-old trailers with housing. That is a good thing.”

This can be a huge hand up for the homeless, like Ronnie Anderson, who stays at La Casa every night. Consecutive strokes made an arm and a leg useless, so Anderson walks with a cane, stopping every few steps to rest. But he’s finally drug free, has been able to hold down a job as a plumber, and feels like the future is looking up.

Not everyone at La Casa, though, has it that together. “These other guys, I really don’t know,” Anderson says, before letting loose on the other shelter dwellers. “A lot of them, they don’t want to do anything…. They don’t know if the man’s gonna give them housing. If you’re rolling around like that, the housing man is not gonna give you a place, because you can’t pay rent.”

Phil Nguyen, hunched into a hoodie on his way out of the trailers on a cold morning says he’ll probably go to Virginia when the shelter closes. Others will probably end up at one of the city’s other men’s shelters, on New York Avenue NE and on the campus of St. Elizabeth’s, each of which hold well north of 300 people. They’re also hard to get to.

Though the Fenty administration has so far placed more than 1,000 people in permanent supportive housing units, it hasn’t made a dent in the shelter population, says Mary Ann Luby, an outreach worker with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. Moreover, she says, many of the apartments are located in heavily African American neighborhoods east of the river, which to La Casa’s many Latino residents will seem like a “foreign land.”

Luby would like to see emergency shelters, even smaller ones, in every ward. But if shelters are hard to take away—as the city learned when it closed the shelter in the Franklin School at 13th and K Streets NW in 2008—they’re even harder to open up. Especially in places that are becoming increasingly desirable for wealthy people with political clout to live.

“Everyone says, ‘Yes, we want to do something for the homeless,’ but no one wants to have it next door,” says Michael Ferrell, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless.

Despite a few complaints about panhandling and harassment of women by La Casa residents, the new Columbia Heights has accepted the shelter as a holdover from the area’s pre-development past. Many, like North Columbia Heights Civic Association president Jeff Zeeman, are looking forward to its replacement by a newer, more civilized La Casa, while emergency shelter goes… somewhere else.

“I do understand concerns about folks needing a place to go in the winter. I do hope those concerns can be addressed,” Zeeman writes. “If they are, this sounds to me like a win-win project that will benefit both the homeless, as well as advancing the sensible smart growth strategy of concentrating large scale development near Metro stations.” Right now, that looks like a pretty big “if.”

—

*CLARIFICATION, 11:40 a.m. – By "crazy things," Zeilinger was referring to the timing of the budget vote in Congress, and did not mean that federal funding for La Casa was in doubt.

Bienvenido a Pho 14. (Lydia DePillis)

Pho 14, the fabulous Vietnamese hole-in-the-wall that set up shop on Park Road in Columbia Heights, is expanding into the space next door. A smart move–the place has a line out the door most evenings, and has a thriving take-out banh mi business. I was mildly surprised, however, to notice that the help-wanted signs in the window are written in both English and Spanish. From purely anecdotal evidence, it seems that most ethnic restaurants tend to hire those of their own nationality to work in their kitchens. Clearly, though, there aren't many Vietnamese folks walking the streets of Columbia Heights. The Vietnamese American Community Service Center tells me there are only some 400 Vietnamese people currently living in the District; most of them move to Maryland or Virginia as soon as they get established. Those who stay are the ones–like Tommy Hoang–who run successful businesses.

It's perfectly wonderful, of course, for Spanish-speakers to work in Vietnamese restaurants. But it's probably less likely that they would graduate from that experience to start their own Vietnamese restaurants, which means banh mi won't proliferate like it has in New York and Seattle and other Southeast Asian destinations.

I would love to be proven wrong, though, because goodness knows I'd love to get some pho on a winter Friday night without having to wait half an hour for a table.

Pastor William Spence just wants to buy the building next door–but he can't. (Darrow Montgomery)

Near the corner of Sherman Avenue and Girard Street NW, there’s a narrow house with a dilapidated porch and a mailbox with a sign reading “PRAYER BOX.” Every Sunday morning, the interior resounds with a joy that belies the shabby façade.

“We thank you for the future, father!” cries a young man at the front of a small congregation, smiling, swaying back and forth to the beats of an electric keyboard and bass. “We know the best is yet to come, father! No storm can move us, father, no situation can move us, father. No weapon may move us today. For we are planning right here today father. Cover us father, as we are moving ahead right father...”

The churchgoers at Harvest Life Pentecostal Church—grandmothers down to toddlers—are on their feet, dancing between the makeshift pews, throwing in the occasional “Jesus!” The music, the wailing, and the amplified sermon are almost deafening in the tiny space. When the service finally concludes, parishioners sit outside chatting, while Pastor William Spence buzzes around checking in on his flock.

From across the street, the scene stands in stark contrast to the decrepit hulk of a building that shares a wall with the little church, like Jekyll and Hyde. It has no roof, and only gaping holes for windows.  The church has wanted to buy the attached building for a decade to use as a community space—and they almost did, in 2001, when the property went into tax foreclosure. But just when Spence had almost acquired the deed, the District snatched the property up for its new initiative to combat vacant properties.

So much for combat: Seven years later, nothing has been done with the shell of a house, except that the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs declared it blighted last January. It’s drained the Harvest Life congregation, which can’t get a loan to fix up its own half of the building while attached to such a dangerously deteriorating structure. Rats and mold infest the basement, which is now destabilizing the church’s foundation, says Spence.

The monstrosity on Sherman Avenue is perhaps the worst example of the troubled Home Again program, launched in 2002 with the best of intentions. The Department of Housing and Community Development is now phasing Home Again out—but many properties are still stuck in its portfolio, mired in litigation and bureaucracy, sticking neighborhoods with blight that otherwise might have been cleared up long ago. Which is, of course, exactly what the program was set up to avoid.

“One of the thing that just hurt our hearts,” Spence says, “is that there were people in the community that had come to believe that we owned that property. That is what it has done to us.”

The District’s battle with vacant properties—of which there are now officially almost 3,000—goes back to at least 1986, with the founding of the Homestead program. Under this regime, the District bought properties in tax foreclosure and disposed of them through a lottery to lucky homebuyers, who paid $250 each and got $10,000 in “seed money” rehabilitation loans to start construction, along with counseling on the development process. Mayor Anthony Williams’ administration ended the lotteries in 2001, after widespread problems with execution—turns out not every would-be homeowner who’d received a property for almost nothing had the wherewithal to actually develop it.

Home Again was supposed to solve that problem. In 2002, the office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development started going after projects even more aggressively, negotiating friendly sales and taking nuisance buildings by eminent domain if necessary in targeted development areas around the city. The properties would be turned over to pre-qualified developers in “bundles,” priced as low as $1,000 per lot. Developers signed contracts obligating them to develop and market the properties at affordable prices within a set time period, usually around 18 months.

Sometimes, this worked. Non-profit developers like Manna, Inc. and Mi Casa were especially successful in delivering dozens of both market-rate and affordable units. But many of the for-profit developers would “cherry pick” the bundles they were awarded, developing those in neighborhoods that could be sold for higher prices while sitting on the others—and with no consequences for inaction, the development contracts were meaningless.

“Most of the time, when people had a property and something wasn’t happening, they would just ask the District for more time, and the District would give them more time, and that was the way it went,” says Leila Finucane Edmonds, director of the Department of Housing and Community Development. “And a lot of that comes from people complaining; because everyone has a reason why they want more time.”

That’s what happened with Castle Development Corporation, which received the Sherman Avenue building along with properties in Shaw and Deanwood. Spence says work began on the building next to Harvest Life church, but it was incorrectly permitted—and the work crew ruptured a gas line at one point, drenching the neighborhood in fumes—so the developer had to re-start the process. Again and again, the District extended its deadlines, while Castle Development escaped the heavy vacant property taxes imposed on other privately-owned unused land (the company still owes over $17,000 in taxes on the Sherman Avenue house, though). After mid-2008, the company became completely unresponsive; the other lots in the bundle haven’t been touched.

Since last July, the District has been working on “recapturing” the properties—determining that the developer has defaulted on the property’s covenant, transferring title back to DHCD, and clearing up leftover liens, warranties, and taxes. Once that process wraps up, they’ll go back out to bid. And Harvest Life church, which could have developed the house immediately back in 2002, has no better chance of finally acquiring the property than anyone else.

Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham sits on the committee that oversees the Home Again program, and sighs in frustration over the many properties in Ward 1 with similar problems. In his office, he pulls out stacks of files documenting each one—some bogged down in financing issues, others completed with construction problems that later had to be remediated.

“There has been, how do you say this, ineptitude, in terms of the bureaucratic performance,” Graham says. “I wouldn’t say that about the current leadership, but some of the prior leadership and staff has not quite been up to the task.”

After the Fenty administration arrived in 2007, the whole vacant property program underwent a reshuffling. The Home Again and leftover Homestead properties were transferred to DHCD under a new Property Acquisition and Development Division, with consolidated powers and more flexible rules for disposition and affordability. Home Again no longer exists as such; while bundles are sometimes still sold to developers directly, the new favored way of getting properties back into circulation is to auction them off and require buyers to rehab them within 18 months.

Edmonds and PADD Manager Martine Combal say they’re more aggressive with communication and enforcement than their predecessors, and more realistic about a developer’s ability to deliver.

“In real estate, location is very important,” Edmonds says. “Whoever comes to develop a property, there are some things that are feasible, and there are some things that are not.”

“And that’s our job to assess before we put together a disposition method,” Combal continues. “We need to be aware up front what those conditions are and what’s feasible.”

Meanwhile, though, the scars of the old regime live on in many neighborhoods. Of the 262 properties in the Home Again portfolio, only 53 have been finished and sold to homebuyers; the rest are in various stages of disposition, development, and recapture.

Sometimes, concerted community action can push them through the process—in Mount Vernon Square, neighbors got Councilmembers Jack Evans of Ward 2 and Tommy Wells of Ward 6 to pass legislation transferring title to a developer who wanted to build new houses on the lot. But in the same neighborhood, a Home Again house on Ridge Street that collapsed in 2007 is still a fenced-in mess, listed on PADD’s report as “awaiting title clearance.” Another, at 454 N St. NW, is just a backless façade.

“What I find sad about the situation is I’ve watched in the 6 years I’ve lived in the neighborhood is that every other property on that block has been purchased and renovated,” says Cary Silverman, president of the Mount Vernon Square Neighborhood Association. “They’re all owned now, and they look great, and this one is still sitting there.”

Back up on Sherman Avenue after church, the woman everyone knows as Ma Bowie—she’s lived in an apartment in Harvest Life’s building ever since her husband started the church in 1983—chats with Ethel Price Gresham, who arrived in the neighborhood a few years ago and was drawn to the friendly congregation. Predominantly, the ladies are just confused as to what’s taking the District so long to deal with the nightmare next door.

“I’ve never seen them allow a structure to fall down like they have,” says Gresham. “That’s what puzzles us. With all the laws and the guidelines that the city has, how does this keep falling through the cracks?”      CP

Visit the Housing Complex blog every day at washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/housingcomplex. Got a real-estate tip? Send suggestions to ldepillis@washingtoncitypaper.com. Or call (202) 332-2100, x 224.